The Age of Search has come to an end

... long live the Age of Recommendation!

The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery. What's the difference? Search is what you do when you're looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn't know existed, or didn't know how to ask for, finds you.

(Jeffrey M. O'Brien, CNN Money)

Search vs. recommendation

Is search a content-based recommendation?

Indexing and retrieval processes = cluster similar documents based exclusively on content (no user information)

Or a poor-man's approach to CF?

Most ranking algorithms can be seen as a simplified CF => recommendation = opinion of the average user (what most people link) or the authorities (what important people link).

To some extent we can say that web structure reflects past users' behavior

Personalized Search

Overall trend -> Personalized user profile for better page ranking

Automatic Identification of User Interest for Personalized Search (Qiu et al. WWW06)

Improve topic-sensitive page rank by inferring topic preference vector for the user.

Similar to content-based recommendation

CubeSVD: A Novel Approach to Personalized Web search (Sun et al WWW05)

LSI using HOSVD to find a score for webpages based on q,u pairs.

Very similar to CF

Question

Are Search and Recommendation two sides of the same coin?